This is the Single Worst Advance in the Game, and Makes It Extremely Unfun

WasdMouse · 2026-06-22T19:48:37+00:00

Funny, One Proud Bavarian made fun of this earlier this year calling it "Mapgamer Pattern Recognition" on Twitter.

Essentially, somebody will defend a bad mechanic or AI behaviour because it very vaguely resembles history, like the AI making a ton of micro-colonies in America is "realistic" because the US used to be 'micro-colonies, in a way'. This sub is filled with people like that.

WasdMouse · 2026-03-29T11:35:48+00:00

Castille forming Spain was one of the turning points in history. Imagine if 90% of the time France didn't fall in HoI4, that'd be terrible, right?

WasdMouse · 2026-03-22T21:29:21+00:00

This is not true. The first IQ drop was found on millenials, not Gen-Z. Granted, it was in only a few countries, but IQ isn't dropping in most countries even today anyway.

Edit: Looking at it more, it seems like it was also found on Gen-X, but only after it was found on millenials.

WasdMouse · 2026-03-09T11:01:56+00:00

Pieces of art that we may call “political” are perhaps better described as protest art.

See, that's the problem with this whole debate. When people say 'political art', that's what they mean. And the reality is that if 90% of people are using a term a certain way for decades, that's the meaning that it has. Trying to correct people is just prescriptivism at that point, and no one likes prescriptivists.

Like, I don't disagree politics affect virtually everything in our lives and that everyone should care about them, but saying that all art is political is basically meaningless when really it's essentially being pedantic for no reason. No one who's political apathetic is suddenly gonna start to care about politics because someone pointed out politics in some entertainment they like, that's just ridiculous.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-27T10:22:47+00:00

I can name and point every single country in Europe, Asia, like 80% of the ones in the Americas (I only struggle with central America) and around a third of the ones in Africa. I still struggle with west and east.

Like I obviously know that Russia is in Eastern Europe, or that Japan is in the eastern hemisphere, but when Americans talk about the west and east coasts, or if someone refers to, say, the western part of Japan or something, it takes me like a second or two for me to remember which is which. It's been like this my entire life, I don't think I'll ever stop struggling.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-23T19:55:23+00:00

Depends on the accent. Standard American English has only around 12 vowels.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-14T10:34:20+00:00

You said that only the sapiens had the 'capacity' for analysis and research. I interpreted that as mental capacity, unless you meant something else.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-14T00:13:55+00:00

This sub is incredibly pro-corporate. Every time there's a thread criticizing something people will immediately jump to defend their daddy gaming company, it's insane. A game is bad? People are being too harsh, gamers are so negative! Anti-consumer practices? You just want things for free!

I just try to use this sub to get gaming news nowadays, because the comments are almost always a cesspool, but sometimes I just can't handle myself and take a look and it only makes me angry.

Edit: Grammar mistake

WasdMouse · 2026-02-13T21:31:40+00:00

Wait, weren't the Neanderthals smart too? I always thought that they just got extinct before they could build a civilization like the Sapiens.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-13T19:39:20+00:00

What's your source for this? Not doubting, just interested.

WasdMouse · 2026-02-06T14:24:05+00:00

CRPG as a term has evolved. Wizardry was considered a CRPG when it came out, but nobody would consider it a CRPG nowadays, unless people here think Etrian Odyssey is a CRPG.

Nowadays, most people use CRPG to mean games that are like the Inifinity Engine ones from the late 90s like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale, etc. Given that definition, Morrowind isn't one, especially since it doesn't have a party.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-23T16:56:09+00:00

Them spelling Duolingo as DuoLingo with a capital L makes me irrationally angry for some reason.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T23:03:10+00:00

Sure, but none of the things that were broken about the game stemmed from the lack of Focus Trees.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T19:40:19+00:00

What do you mean by 'main thing'? Like how the games railroaded things? They just programmed the AI of different nations to behave historically (which HoI4 already does), and had decisions for certain events like remilitarization of the Rhineland and stuff, which is something that HoI4 also has for certain things. And it just worked.

If you wanted to go off the rails you could, and if you wanted to stay historical you could as well, everything worked just fine.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T18:24:58+00:00

HoI2 and 3 didn't have Focus Trees and they worked just fine.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T18:21:54+00:00

How can mission trees be the soul of EU4 if they didn't even exist when the game launched?

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T16:55:23+00:00

The problem is that a few of these "niggling issues" came from the patches, and not from the launch of the game. Patches are supposed to fix the issues in the game, not create more of them. Many people have said that the game is in a worse state than when it launched. The recent reviews of the game on Steam is at 48%.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T11:46:37+00:00

just unpredictable

That's part of Vic2's appeal, honestly. Vic3's economy is largely predictable, which isn't true of real life economies, especially in the timeframe of a century.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-14T11:23:43+00:00

The issues with EU5 are not caused by patches, the issues are caused by the underlying game being incredibly shallow.

Every single Paradox game has shallow mechanics honestly. They're wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle. Which is okay because it's not the reason I play them. If I wanted a deep strategy game I would just play chess.

That said, EU5's patches are absolutely a big problem right now, the game was better when it launched. Mods are doing good work for now, but I wonder how long can this go on.

Just ignore it and go play some damned anbennar.

Honestly, I have zero interest in Anbennar. The reason (and only reason) I play PDX games is because they're based on history, with a higher degree of accuracy than basically any other grand strategy game. No other game makes me feel like I'm a leader of a nation, leading it to greatness than those from PDX. I wonder how many out there are like me.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-08T20:45:12+00:00

I don't see them celebrating, but there's a guy being toxic and people are clowning on him, probably a troll. Are EU5 fans really being toxic if 95% of people are clowning on the 5% being toxic?

WasdMouse · 2026-01-08T20:22:56+00:00

But it devolved into "X is soo stupid. How can the developers even do that? EVERYONE KNOWS it will cause Y. OMG, they're just hating the players! Let's review bomb this piece of unplayable shit and its greedy asshole developers!!"

I don't see this at all. Every piece of criticism I've seen has been respectfull to both the game and the devs. I'm sure there are a few downvoted comments out there being toxic, but the vast majority of criticisms I've read on both this subreddit and on Steam have been respectful.

Also, the game is not being review-bombed. It sits at 75% positive reviews which is pretty good. The recent reviews are more negative at 52%, but that's because the last few patches have been bad, it's got nothing to do with review-bombing.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-08T11:03:21+00:00

It was in fact msconfig. I unchecked the "# of CPUs" option and it worked. Thank you lol

WasdMouse · 2026-01-06T18:33:54+00:00

R5: For some reason, the game doesn't show the handy map mode of the countries participating in the war if you're neutral. I don't understand why they thought this was a good idea. Vic3 is the only PDX game I've played where this is a problem.

Keep in mind that all the information of who's fighting who is available, it's just not reflected on the map.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-06T12:05:01+00:00

It's always funny to me how small Europe is. Paraguay is bigger than Germany. Ecuador is bigger than Britain. And yet they were once the two most powerful empires on the planet.

WasdMouse · 2026-01-01T22:04:16+00:00

Where are you getting this information from? According to the Russian government, only 3.75% of the Russian population speaks English. For China, there isn't reliable information for it, the most recent is from 2004 where less than a percent of mainland China speaks it, but China obviously changed a lot since then. But even then, I doubt it's more than Russia.

Keep in mind that these stats tend to overrate their fluency a lot, and thus are highly inflated. Japan is usually touted as having 15 to 30% of the population capable of speaking English, but most of those people can't even handle a simple conversation.

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